Well, last week I had a minor financial crisis that is eminently survivable but also very unsettling and a super-duper pain in the neck. It centered on losing a nice part-time job when the home health agency I was working for closed down. The owner was tired from a slow recovery from covid, and had been under assault by another agency with a reputation for sic’ing the State and Federal medical services auditors on anyone that they regard as a competitor. Even if you come up with a clean audit, those are time-consuming and nerve wracking, and produce no revenue. That can be deadly for a small business. So once the audits were over, the boss said, ”Enough!” That was on top of limited work time for myself and Spouse because we both have had some major surgery over the past two years or so. I can’t blame anything but bad luck and bad timing, really, but it has been a hard kick in the pocketbook.
No, I’m not asking for help. Something will turn up and we are far from hunger or homelessness. What I am doing, though, is a little bit of speech therapy on myself. You see, I have a history of stuttering when under duress. Most of my childhood was under duress, with a dad who took a lot of his WW2 PTSD out on the kids, primarily me. I got a lot of practice in dysfluency, and in hiding it pretty well, when I was a child. Therapy was out of the question. Both parents regarded seeking that kind of help to be a mortifying admission of weakness and failure. Drama class helped: throwing myself into the persona of some other being did a lot to keep my little personal demon in its cage. Unfortunately, acting out parts is not a component of the normal pace of life.
My fairly mild stutter receded when I left home, but has never gone away completely. When I am under stress it still will rear its ugly head and laugh at me. It was one of the things that eventually led me to become a speech therapist. I even wrote my master’s thesis on some of the psychological aspects of adult stuttering. (Unless you are a specialist, it’s pretty boring reading, all statistics and tentative conclusions in the best scientific form.)
Knowledge is power. Once I got over the initial surprise when I went to answer a question from Spouse and hung up on the first three words of the sentence, I knew very well what was going on. Spouse, bless his heart, said nothing until a couple days later when I gave him permission to comment as much as he cared to. He just gave me a hug.
I like to use some of the philosophy behind cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to deal with this kind of problem. One aspect of that involves being pretty up front with yourself and others about what’s happening in the moment. The emotional load of pretending that it isn’t there is very counterproductive. Ignoring that hippopotamus in the living room won’t make the hippo go away. Worse is getting upset about it. Both ways of thinking sap you of emotional energy that could be better spent elsewhere. For me that elsewhere is a more concentrated search for a new part-time job and developing an idea I had about a class in a craft that I am good at.
So that’s what I’m doing now. I’m shining a disinfectant light on this unseen and unwelcome characteristic, allowing the fresh breeze of probably TMI (too much information) to clear my head, and my speech patterns. So to the stutter, welcome back, dammit. Now go away, OK?
PS — here is a link to a pretty good article about Joe Biden’s lifelong battle with stuttering. It has nothing to do with his cognitive status. niemanreports.org/...
